Paul Dumbrell has secured pole for today’s 250km Dunlop Series race, but all the talk from yesterday’s session was about Andrew Jones’ big incident on The Esses.

The Brad Jones Racing driver lost control on the exit out of Skyline as his car careered into the outside wall at The Esses, causing heavy damage to his Holden and scattering debris over the road.

Several cars just managed to avoid Jones’ car which was stranded in the middle of the road.

The resulting red flag led to an eight-minute wait for the rest of the field down at Pit Straight.

Jones was sitting in fourth place when the incident occurred halfway through the 40- minute qualifying window.

Dumbrell would eventually clock a two minutes and 7.0625 second lap around Mount Panorama on his penultimate trip. 

The three drivers that were sitting above Jones following his crash were Dumbrell, Cam Waters and Jack Le Brocq – all with times they set on their first flying lap.

At the time of the Jones crash, Dumbrell led the way on 2:07.0747, a time that no other driver would end up matching.

While all three would improve their times, the order wouldn’t change by the time the clock ticked down.

Le Brocq briefly jumped into second place before championship leader Waters took that back with a 2:07.3134.

A 2:07:5165 was Le Brocq’s final mark.

Dumbrell’s improved lap saw him finish very close to the record practice and qualifying time of 2:06.9937 he set last year.

Ant Pedersen, Todd Hazelwood, Garry Jacobson, Macauley Jones, Aaren Russell, Josh Kean and Andrew Jones will round out the top 10 for today’s race.

Jones wasn’t the only one who held up proceedings during qualifying.

Aaron McGill also brought out a red flag earlier in the session when he went off at The Chase.

Chris Pither was not able to get out on track for qualifying as his team were still repairing damage sustained in a crash at The Dipper during the second practice session.